I love to improvise, I think that's why celebrating holidays
overseas is my favorite.
I grew up in a little town in Indonesia.
Making traditional Christmas and Thanksgiving meals took a lot of work on my
mom’s part. One year (I don’t know which holiday it was for, let’s say
Thanksgiving since it works so well in my line of thought) my parents decided
to have turkey. No big deal right? Butterball turkeys in the open market,
right? Well, perhaps we named him Butterball, but I don’t think so because the
live turkey running around our back yard was not that fat. Maybe we named him
Beanpole. But he had to be caught, killed, de-feathered and gutted, well you
get the picture. I don’t remember my parents ever deciding to do that again. I
suppose that’s why having turkey is not a big deal to me. Chicken is just as
good, thank you.
But it's not always overseas. Sometimes you have to improvise in
good 'ol United States too. One of my favorite Thanksgiving memories in Texas
is the time I ate at a Chinese restaurant with my Grandmother. The restaurant
was empty, since everyone else in Dallas was at home eating turkey and
dressing. Grandmother and I had a quiet and relaxing Thanksgiving dinner with
no cleanup. If you love cashew chicken and a plate of rice, you can't beat that
deal.
A third favorite memory is the year Kris
and I lived in Eritrea and I invited my two English students to our house for
Thanksgiving Dinner. They wanted to help, so I made all the "fixins"
and they brought zighini: the traditional super spicy chicken dish. Maybe not
quite the traditional turkey, but it worked. In retrospect, it was a bad idea
to invite just the two of them because one was my closest friend and the other
was a married man whose wife lived in a different city. Honestly, I think the
two of them liked each other, so it didn't help that I invited them over and it
was like a double date. That should have been super awkward for me, but I think
I didn't even realize how weird that was until it was too late. It was still a
fun day with yummy food.
This memory probably explains why
yesterday, after twenty years of never attempting to replicate it, I decided to
make injera: a tricky-to-make-but-yummy-to-eat Eritrean bread. So yesterday,
while preparing for our big Thanksgiving celebration for today, I was also
attempting to make a sourdough starter for injera. It's sitting on the cabinet
fermenting today. A grey stinky mixture, slightly less than it started out
because who knew that the yeast was so potent? And the whole wheat/rye mixture
grew like a giant wet blob and spilled all over the cabinet. But I only lost a
portion of it and the rest is safely back into a larger container and rotting
(oops I mean fermenting) on the counter-top.
This evening, while eating a “proper” Thanksgiving meal with all
the accoutrements, I’ll be smiling as I think of the turkey running around our back yard in a little market town in Indonesia, I'll be remembering Grandmother sitting across from me in a
booth at the Chinese restaurant in Texas, and I’ll
be reminiscing a make-shift Thanksgiving dinner in Eritrea (and wondering if my
gray blob of fermenting dough is getting a life of its own again and if it will have taken
over the kitchen by the time we get home tonight). I’ll be feeling thankful for
the Thanksgivings that were traditionally perfect and all the ones that were perfectly
un-traditional.
And I’ll be thankful…so very thankful…to have celebrated each one.
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!
